The Internet has become the leading marketplace for purchasing goods and services. Consumers can now purchase almost any product, from groceries to vacations, through the internet. There are numerous websites that a consumer can make a purchase through. As an example, Home Depot® owns a website that allows consumers to purchase goods from its various brick and mortar stores. Retail chains, e.g., Target®, and other brick-and-mortar stores can offer goods available at their stores through their websites as well.
In order to purchase a certain product, a consumer has to search for dedicated electronic commerce (e-commerce) websites that offer the product for sale or search for the product within an e-commerce website. Some existing solutions may further facilitate online purchases and/or enhance in-store selling via e-commerce websites or search engines. However, such solutions typically do not provide accurate availability of goods in local stores. Because many consumers are more interested in finding the product anywhere than in one particular store or from one particular retail chain, e-commerce product listings that only show availability at particular stores are not always desirable.
Other disadvantages associated with e-commerce websites relate to the fact that a consumer cannot easily note if a certain product is “physically” available in a local store while searching for a website through which to purchase the product. In order to find such information, a consumer first searches for the product through an e-commerce website and then finds a nearby store (if such store exists) that keeps the desired product. Through this process, the inventory is only verified after the product is presented to the consumer. Besides being a cumbersome process for the consumer, e-commerce websites do not always maintain accurate information with regard to the current inventory of local stores. As a result, a product that is available may be presented as unavailable in a certain store, and vice versa. In most cases, the consumer has to directly connect to the local store (by, e.g., phone or email) in order to verify that the product is physically available. This connection requirement leads to fewer sales and consumer frustration.
Further, some customers are particularly interested in verifying a quantity of goods in stock in addition to merely whether the goods are in stock at a particular store. For example, a customer painting his or her entire house may wish to verify that he or she will be able to purchase multiple cans of the same paint from the same store. Verifying that a sufficient quantity of a product is in stock may require calling a salesperson at the store and requesting the salesperson to manually check inventory, which may be inconvenient to both the customer and to the salesperson.
In addition, a consumer searching for goods via e-commerce websites can gain knowledge about the local availability of the goods only through e-commerce websites that are related to the local stores. For example, a consumer shopping for a light bulb at the Home Depot® website can only find if the light bulb is available in a nearby Home Depot® store. However, the consumer does not know if the same light bulb is in a different (and possibly closer) store.
As local businesses, such as brick-and-mortar stores, often do not maintain e-commerce websites and/or do not invest in the promotion of such websites, consumers cannot easily locate and purchase goods offered by such businesses except by manually requesting information directly from the businesses. Further, even if such brick-and-mortar stores regularly stock particular goods, a consumer cannot find a particular local store that has the good in stock without searching every local store, either in person or by calling the store, for that good until the user finds a store that has the good in stock. This search can be time-consuming, physically demanding, expensive, and may involve the consumer dealing with adverse weather conditions in pursuit of the goods.
Moreover, from the perspective of the business, the inability of consumers to efficiently determine local availability of goods may prevent those consumers from having a definitive answer regarding whether a particular product is available for purchase and, as such, may lead to reduced sales. Such reduced sales may cause the local stores and/or distributors to stop carrying particular products even when there is sufficient demand for the products to justify carrying them.
Moreover, brick-and-mortar stores generally stock products without maintaining or otherwise dynamically updating the inventory as products are added or removed from the store. This leads to inaccurate inventory data that prevents local stores and distributors from determining, in real-time, which product is in short supply, out of stock, and so on, except by manually taking inventory (e.g., counting stock, subtracting numbers of goods sold from numbers of goods delivered, and so on). Such information is further valuable to distributors, who may wish to contact and supply inventory to the stores ahead of time (i.e., before the stores run out of stock).
In addition to the above, merchants and, in particular, brick-and-mortar stores, often do not invest in generating quality and accurate media assets related to the products offered for sale. A media asset may include, for example, a picture, a video clip, a textual description, and the like. As a result, a product is often identified merely by its stock keeping unit (SKU) which may be unique to a particular store, or by its universal product code (UPC). It would be further useful for consumers to be able to visually verify products that they are seeking from local stores.
It would therefore be advantageous to provide an inventory management system to be integrated in e-commerce solutions that overcomes the deficiencies noted above.